Reporters on the Job

September 7, 2007

• Dodging Mortars: For two days, staff writer Scott Peterson went out on patrols with US and Afghan troops in Paktia Province. He watched as they searched the fortress-shaped mud houses of Chawni for Taliban fighters. They found few weapons or fighting-aged men as they headed deeper into Taliban territory.

Scott, his colleagues from The New York Times, and the troops they were embedded with had just sent up a small camp in the Afghan countryside. It had been another quiet day. Scott had set up his satellite phone and computer alongside a US Army Humvee. "I'd just got the Internet working when a mortar whistled overhead.

"Is that incoming or outgoing? Then a second 82-mm shell landed 200 yards to the east of us, bursting into a thunderous spray of sparks," he says.

Clearly, incoming.

He and his colleagues hurriedly tossed their gear into the Humvee to move. "Cameras, computers, rucksacks, everything. But it was dark, so I didn't see my Ethernet cable as I slammed the door on it," he laments. Normally, that might be a serious blow to his ability to send stories to Boston.

But Scott, a former Eagle Scout, had brought a backup cable.

And the Taliban?

No third shell arrived. But "it was clear they were sending a message that they knew we were here. They had perfectly bracketed our position with those two mortar rounds. "